Welcome back to “On the Road” with Atlantic British. Atlantic British sales associate Eric Riston (extension 231) is leading a group of fellow off-road enthusiasts on a cross-country road trip to Moab, Utah, and back. Along the way they've visited with Land Rover clubs, sampled a variety of tourist destinations, and spent several days off-roading in Utah with Bill Burke of Bill Burke’s 4-Wheeling America and Camel Trophy fame.
Our last installment ended with an awful vibration and chirping coming from under the hood of one of the Discovery 2s on the trip down Long Canyon from the group’s Moab base camp. We now rejoin the adventure as Eric and company attempt to find the cause of the trouble.
After pulling over and finding a shattered and completely missing tensioner pulley on the Discovery, the decision was made to split the group. One group would make the 50-mile drive back to camp to grab the spares we had brought, and the other group would stay and pull the Rover apart. The round trip to get parts took about two hours, but once the part was in hand, the Rover was up and running in a little over 20 minutes. At this point it was getting late so we decided to head back to camp for the night. We spent the next few days wheeling more trails, testing the limits of the trucks and visiting Arches National Park.
On Wednesday we had to break camp, pack the trailers, and head east. We decided to head south to Monticello and across the corner of Colorado and into New Mexico to I-40. In New Mexico I had to make a stop to pick up some boxes of fragile toy trains. It's amazing the strange things you can get roped into on a cross-country trip. After the toy train pickup we jumped back on I-40 and continued east.
We decided we would make the trip home into an adventure of its own, using the “Roadside America” app. For those that are unfamiliar with “Roadside America,” it started as a book of all the weird and wonderful and possibly a little strange things you can see along the roads in this great country. Our first stop would be Cadillac Ranch. It's odd and wonderful but not nearly as odd as Slugbug Ranch just down the road. It seems cars half-buried is a big thing in this part of the country. Another roadside attraction we would hit this day would be “The Big Texan,” home of the 72-ounce steak. If you can eat it and all the sides in an hour, it's free. None of us were up for the challenge, so we ate normal-sized (for Texas) meals and pushed on.
The next day we hit a bunch more roadside attractions: the first Phillips 66 gas station, the Devil's Rope Barbed Wire Museum, the Leaning Water Tower. The list of stuff to see goes on and on. We decided that it was getting time to get some miles under our wheels since we where starting to run out of days and had lots of ground to cover. Just as we start the big push I get a call on the CB, "I'm smelling a lot of coolant back here!" It seems that whenever I'm running late on trips and decide to make up time, the Rovers throw a curve ball...
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